The Time Traveler's Wife

The Time Traveler's Wife is the debut novel by the American writer Audrey Niffenegger, published in 2003. It is a love story about Henry, a man whose genetic disorder makes him travel in time unpredictably, and Clare, the artist he marries, and Niffenegger has said she began writing it while frustrated with love, using the premise as a metaphor for relationships that arrive at the wrong moment.

The book is not told in order. Clare meets Henry as a child, and the man she talks to is her future husband; when both are adults their knowledge of each other is uneven, so each of them carries information the other has not been given yet. Henry's absences are physical and involuntary, and his condition decides how the marriage works, from the practical arrangements of clothing and money to the day he already knows is coming.

Niffenegger writes the novel as a double first-person, alternating the two voices, so the reader assembles a marriage from both ends and from a hundred small gaps. It became her best-known work, and the method of withholding the order of events is what readers tend to remember about it.